David Lloyd bars men from spa sessions

David Lloyd, one of Britain's largest gym chains, has barred men from spa sessions at its clubs. The stated reason: some women members feel uncomfortable, for religious reasons, sharing the spa with men. The policy has sparked an equality row.

Both sides are arguing in the name of equality. Critics call the exclusion of men discriminatory; defenders answer that women who cannot undress in mixed company are shut out of the spa altogether unless hours are set aside. What nobody disputes is who decided: not a regulator, not a council, not a statute — a company reading its own membership and choosing which customers to schedule around.

That is the difference between this row and its public-sector cousins. A private chain that restricts its own services carries the consequences itself. Members who find the policy intolerable can cancel and move their fees to a competitor down the road; the chain's accounts will register the verdict within a renewal cycle. When a public authority closes a facility to one group, the excluded have no exit — the cost is spread across taxpayers who cannot withhold payment, and the officials who drew up the timetable answer to no ledger at all. At David Lloyd, the bill has an address.

No law required the change and no regulator ordered it. The timetable is a commercial judgment about which members the chain can least afford to lose. If enough members object, the sessions will shrink; if enough women use them, they will spread. The chain has reason to find out which, because it pays for the answer either way. Equality legislation may yet be invoked — both sides are already quoting it at each other — but the deciding votes were never in a courtroom. They sit with members holding direct debits.

Whether the judgment was sound will be settled the way private judgments are settled: by who renews and who leaves.